Messages - PressureLine

So Hein and I were forced to shut the site down for a few weeks until we managed to get a bit of a spam situation under control. Now that it is, and the reason for the 'your website is being used to send unusually large volumes of emails, please investigate' messages we were receiving has been resolved we've been able to bring the site back online. Currently new user registrations are disabled, but I will fix that up over the coming days.

Rawbots downloads are available here. As well as the vanilla 0.1.4 install, I would also suggest downloading and installing XFM, which adds several important maths functions, as well as a few quality-of-life features and speedups.

Perhaps the custom wheel physics is to deal with how wheels start to skip over the surface at high speed or tend to dig in when steering at speed. I assume the wheel physics model is built from polygons rather than being treated as a perfect cylinder, so the custom physics could be to smooth over that so bots don't effectively have square wheels.

Quite the opposite usually. A perfect cylinder is used for several reasons: the obvious 'square wheels' thing, plus in most physics sim engines, there are pre-defined shapes (spheres, cylinders, 'capsules' [a cylinder with hemispherical endcaps] and cubes) that are far more efficient than arbitrary polygonal shapes because they can (and do!) have various speedups built in to the engine.

The bot is capable of navigating a fairly complex route through the maze, it just needs a little work (and a few more sensors) to be able to get up/down ramps.

owl also did some explorer bots (which also served as the basis for the owlbot ACL bot) with fairly sophisticated navigation systems:

It all depends on what the 'goals' for the movement are. For an ACL bot, my 'goals' for the nav system are simple: Never stop moving, don't get stuck, try not to hit walls, get up/down ramps, and usually 'follow the target, but don't get too close' (unless melee, in which case the bot wants to get as close as possible to be able to damage the target)

For me, part of it is that the system needs to be physically compact in terms of sensors (to be able to keep the hooks nicely tucked away inside the body armor), and that the logic needs to be fairly simple to avoid the bot locking up (to fufill the 'always moving' goal) since in arena combat, doing something is pretty much always preferable to doing nothing.

Why not just make some super-huge arenas? Planets are hinky because the grav field isn't that big, and the curvature screws with things (altitude difference & distance trig for one) something fierce. Changing the max distance of cameras to something bigger (afair it's 256 in XFM 0.5) is really easy, making it 512 (or whatever) would certainly lessen the 'search' time required on arenas (and on planetary surfaces)

Tech Arena Hex is a pretty big arena, it would be relatively easy to expand it even more to provide for long-range gameplay.

From memory you can take the shoot force and divide it by 39.5 (or a similar number) to get the velocity of the projectile. I do have a ballistic calculator level saved (it operates at about 0.8G though, like most blueshift-based maps) that I can upload tonight if you want.

For a combat bot I usually just pre-compute (using the ballistic calculator at a given capacitance and distance [usually 250]) then do

(distance to target/pre-computed distance)*pre-computed angleto get the superelevation angle, then do straight altitude based calculation to get the straight-line angle between the cannon and the target, add them together to get the total angle required. That will usually generate a hit on a bot-sized target at a reasonable range (just a reminder that this is based on using a blueshift-based map, where the distance between targets and the altitude difference is not affected by the spherical gravity field of a planet)

As for peerplays integration, that will basically facilitate the players having an in-game marketplace where you can sell your creations. Some of you have put in a lot of hours into your creations and this will let you profit from that. Of course, you'll also be able to share your creations for free.

Do you have any details on the interaction between Rawbots ingame money (please call them botcoins) and real money?

How will it work with 'unrestricted' private servers? Is it possible to earn botcoins via ingame actions? (ie: extracting and processing resources) Can I convert botcoins back into USD? What protections against the system being used for illegal activity (money laundering etc) will be in place if the botcoin-USD conversion is a 2-way street?

Also, what is the planned server architecture? One big official server that everyone plays on? 'Rented' dedicated servers? (Similar to Minecraft Realms) Full peer-to-peer client-client interaction? If it is P2P how are you planning to regulate the economy? (For example I could make a load of botcoins on a private server and transfer that balance to a big public server, thereby giving myself a massive advantage, or simply using Rawbots to mine USD)

No real problem with anything on this page. But having no info on how the game is going to be set up (contiguous single universe hosted on an official server? [Eve Online] Instanced multiverse hosted on official servers? [World of Tanks] Instanced multiverse on player servers [minecraft]) or how the ingame economy is going to work (can I earn 'Rawbots Gold' by my actions ingame?) it's hard to say whether being able to invest $US into buying blueprints etc is actually a good thing (also dependent on the yield of ingame actions, if I can buy everything I ever want with what I can earn ingame, why invest real money? If the yield is too low, you won't be able to be self-sustaining ingame, so why even try?)

Got some issues with this... While it depends on the pricing model, but if it's 'pay $30 up front' or 'monthly sub' based I don't really like the idea of having to pay more to access what I would consider to be 'core' parts of the game. If it's just things like 'chrome shader for armor parts' , 'wheels that leave flame trails' , 'coloured smoke trails for jets' or 'plasma cannons shoot flaming skulls' and stuff like that which is 'just for fun' that fine imo. Even in a Free To Play environment, to avoid it becoming 'Pay To Win' you can't really have things like body armor or things that give a true, measurable ingame advantage.

I remember having a similar conversation about 10 years ago with one of the lead developers of Path Of Exile on the subject, and the general gist of how they planned to fund their F2P model is this:

Quote

Completely free to download and play. Supported by ethical microtransactions.

Path of Exile is completely free to play - no upfront costs or monthly fees are required to enjoy 100% of the game content.

To fund the development and maintenance costs of the project, we plan to let players purchase aesthetic perks for their characters such as:

Development of Rawbots is underway and there's nothing new to report. It is slated for a soft launch at the end of April [2017].

On the Peerplays thing. If Rawbots is planned to be a persistent-universe type MMO (like Eve Online) or even an 'instanced' universe (World of Tanks, War Thunder, Gear Up) it makes sense to have a 'secure' ingame currency. Although I am not sure how much I like having said currency having 'real world' value. How much I [dis]like the idea also depends a lot on the monetisation plan.

Yes, we've switched over to Unreal Engine and it is going to be basically a rewrite of the code. The benefits are hopefully a much more optimized physics engine and multiplayer. I know the community and also us have been hoping for multiplayer for a long time, now we can have it.

As for peerplays integration, that will basically facilitate the players having an in-game marketplace where you can sell your creations. Some of you have put in a lot of hours into your creations and this will let you profit from that. Of course, you'll also be able to share your creations for free.

Will share more details as we get more things working. For now we're simply in development mode hoping this all works out.

It has it's problems, but that bot is absolutely devastating and looks cool too.

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How much of the tail structure is necessary? It looks like it might be relatively simple to get the part count down enough to enter the middleweight class.

The main point of Scorpion was mostly 'Rule of Cool' anyway, so the fact that it can easily hold it's own in a heavyweight match is more of a bonus really.

The 4 floaters in the tail section can be removed (was designed that way so that combat damage to the tail wouldn't disable the bot) as can the projector between the cannons. Other than that, without structural changes to the chassis (going single-row rather than double-row) I don't think you could wave a 'middleweight' wand at Scorpion and have it be actually effective. Not that a middleweight Scorpion wouldn't be possible, just that it would need to be built as a middleweight from the start imo.